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The Sinister Hiss

The author’s father, a successful engineer, hid microfilm of his patents in his underwear in a desperate attempt to save his life’s work.

By

Gal

Beckerman

Dec. 18, 2014 6:39 p.m. ET

There are some words that, through a sort of onomatopoeia, seem fated to be the worst epithets. In Russian, zhid is one of those. Ask any Soviet Jew who grew up in that now extinct empire what it felt like to be on the receiving end of the slur, whose English approximation is “kike,” and they will mention the sound: a sinister hiss ending with a snap of the tongue against the back of the teeth.

For Lev Golinkin, the author of a new memoir about his family’s immigration from Soviet Ukraine to the West, that sibilant sound...